The Crimson Petal and the White

by Michel Faber

  ‘And after you’ve seen my factory, we’ll go to Lockhart’s Cocoa Rooms,’ says Father, nodding across to Sophie with his eyes exaggeratedly wide. ‘You’ll like that, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ Sophie says. Merely to be addressed by him is a privilege worth any disappointment.

  ‘I have told that fool Paltock he’s to sort himself out by the thirty-first of this month,’ he goes on. ‘It was high time, don’t you think?’

  Sophie ponders this for a moment, then realises that her role in the conversation has come to an end.

  Miss Sugar draws a deep breath and looks out of the window.

  ‘You know best, I’m sure,’ she says.

  ‘When I say “that fool”, I didn’t call him that in my letter, of course.’

  ‘No, I should hope not.’ Sugar pauses, chewing at tiny flakes of dry skin on her lips. Then: ‘He’ll transfer his allegiances to your competitors without the slightest scruple, I’m sure, and at a time when it inconveniences you to the maximum degree.’

  ‘All the more reason to give him a nudge now, before the Season.’

  Sophie turns her head to the window. If her father should feel any further need to speak to her, he’ll no doubt summon her attention.

  The journey through the city is wonderfully interesting. Apart from Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, whose trees she recognises in passing, and the big marble arch, everything is new to her. Cheesman has been instructed ‘not to get us snarled in traffic’, and so he steers the carriage through all sorts of unfamiliar thoroughfares, re-joining Oxford Street only when unavoidable. When he comes to the so-called circus at which, on their previous outing, Sophie was disappointed not to witness any lions or elephants, he doesn’t turn right towards the bright commotion, but keeps going straight.

  Soon the buildings and shops are looking neither grand nor cheerful –indeed, they look shabby, and so do the people on the footpaths. All the men bear a strange resemblance to Mr Woburn the knife-sharpener who comes to the Rackham house, and all the women look like Letty except not as neat and clean, and nobody sings or shouts or whistles or declares they’ve something that only costs a ha’penny and is worth half a crown. They move like dreary phantoms through the grey chill, and when they lift their faces to note the passing of the Rackham carriage, their eyes are black as coals.

  The paving under the wheels of the carriage becomes more and more uneven, and the streets narrower. The houses now are in a frightful state, all jumbled together and falling apart, with long sagging lines of people’s underclothes and bed-sheets hung in plain view, as if no one here is the least bit ashamed of wetting the bed. There’s a horrid smell of dirty things, substances that Shears might use to make plants grow or kill them, and the women and children have hardly any clothes on.

  As they rattle through the worst street yet, Sophie notices a little girl standing barefoot by a large iron bucket. The child, dressed in a buttonless blouse so large that its ragged hem clings to her filthy ankles, taps the bucket idly with a stick. Yet, although in these respects the girl is as different from Sophie as the trolls in Uncle Henry’s fairytale book, their faces — the girl’s face, and Sophie’s face — share such a striking resemblance that Sophie is agog, and leans her head out of the carriage window to stare.

  The urchin child, finding herself the object of unwelcome attention, reaches down into her bucket and with a single unhesitating motion hurls a small missile. Sophie doesn’t pull her head back; she can’t quite believe that the dark thing flashing through the air exists in the same world as her own body and the carriage in which she sits; rather, she’s entranced by the expression of stubborn malevolence on her twin’s face … entranced for an instant only. Then the projectile hits her right between the eyes.

  ‘What the devil …!’ yelps William, as his daughter sprawls backwards onto the cabin floor.

  ‘Sophie!’ cries Sugar, lurching violently as Cheesman reins the carriage to a halt. She scoops the child into her arms, relieved to see only bewilderment, no blood. No serious harm has been done, thank God: there’s a mucky brown mark on Sophie’s brow, and in her flailings for balance she has (with the unerring bad luck that attends such mishaps) squashed the fallen dog turd between her palm and the toe of Father’s left shoe.

  Instinctively, Sugar grabs the nearest loose cloth — the embroidered antimacassar from the seat next to William’s — and begins to wipe Sophie’s face with it.

  ‘Haven’t you got a handkerchief!’ barks William, in a state of furious agitation. His fists are clenched, his chest heaves, he thrusts his angry face out of the window, but the urchin has vanished like a rat. Then, noticing that Sophie’s hand is still dark with dogshit, he recoils against the wall of the cabin, away from any further besmirching.

  ‘Stop thrashing about, you stupid child!’ he yells. ‘Sugar, take her glove off first! God almighty, can’t you see …!’ The two females, cowed by his rage, fumble to obey. ‘And what were you doing,’ he bawls at Sophie, ‘poking your head out like that, like an imbecile? Have you no sense whatsoever?’

  He’s trembling, and Sugar knows his outburst is as much from distress as anything else; his nerves have never quite recovered from his beating. She cleans Sophie as best she can, while William jumps out of the cabin and washes his shoe, with the help of a rag supplied by Cheesman.

  ‘A splash of beer’s the remedy for that, sir,’ chirrups the coachman. ‘I always keep some ‘andy for just such a purpose.’

  While the men are busy, Sugar examines Sophie’s face. The child is sobbing almost imperceptibly, her breaths shallow and quick, but there are no tears, and not so much as a whimper of complaint.

  ‘Are you hurt, Sophie?’ whispers Sugar, licking the tip of her thumb and wiping one vestigial smudge of muck from the child’s pale flesh.

  Sophie juts her jaw forward, and her eyes blink hard.

  ‘No, Miss.’

  For the continuation of the journey, Sophie sits as still as a waxwork or a parcel, responding only to the joltings of the carriage wheels. William, once his explosion of temper has settled, becomes aware of what he’s done, and shows his contrition with such offerings as ‘Well, that was a n-narrow escape, w-wasn’t it, Sophie?’ and ‘We sh-shall have to get you some n-new gloves now, sh-shan’t we?’ — all delivered in a jolly tone that’s pitiful and irritating in equal measure.

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ says Sophie quietly, displaying her good manners but nothing more. Her gaze is unfocused; or rather, it is focused upon some layer of the cosmos that’s invisible to gross creatures called William Rackham. Never has her resemblance to Agnes been as remarkable as it is now.

  ‘Look, Sophie!’ says William. ‘We’re about to cross Waterloo Bridge!’

  Obediently, Sophie looks out of the window, her head pulled well back from the aperture. After a minute or two, though — to William’s palpable relief — the magic of a vast body of water viewed from a great height does its work, and Sophie leans forward, her elbow resting on the window-ledge.

  ‘What do you see, hmm?’ says William, clownishly attentive. ‘Barges, I expect?’

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ says Sophie, staring down into the churning grey-green expanse. It’s scarcely recognisable as the neat blue ribbon on the map that Miss Sugar showed her this morning, but if this bridge they’re crossing is Waterloo Bridge then they must be very near Waterloo Station, where her Mama got lost while searching for the Music School. Sophie peers down into the distant water and wonders which bit of it, exactly, is the bit where her mother sank under the waves and drank more water than a living body can hold.

  Outside the iron gates of the Rackham soap factory in Lambeth, a carriage stands waiting, shackled to two placid grey horses. In this coach, behold: Lady Bridgelow. Ensconced snugly in the burnished cabin, like an aquamarine pearl in a four-wheeled shell, she draws all eyes to her even before she alights.

  ‘Lord, look at that smoke …’ tuts William, as he steps out of his own carriage and peers regr
etfully into a sky tainted with the murky efflux from Doulton & Co, Stiff & Sons, and various other potteries, glass-makers, breweries and soap-makers in the neighbourhood. He guiltily appraises his own chimneys, and is reassured to note that the smoke issuing from them is wispy and clean.

  ‘Oh, William, there you are!’ Inside the coach, a pale starfish of pigskin fingers wiggles.

  Approaching Lady Bridgelow after he’s motioned the watchman to throw the gates wide, William apologises profusely for any inconvenience she may have suffered, to which she responds by insisting that it’s her fault for arriving earlier than they’d agreed.

  ‘I’ve been looking forward to it so much, you see,’ she trills, allowing herself to be helped out onto the footpath.

  ‘Difficult for me to believe …’ says William, gesturing vaguely at the utilitarian ugliness of the factory’s immediate locale, so different from the glittering pleasure gardens he imagines are Lady Bridgelow’s natural habitat.

  ‘Oh, so you doubt my word!’ she teases him, feigning offence with a limp diminutive hand laid on her satiny blue breast. ‘No but really, William, you mustn’t take me for an old relic. I’ve no desire to spend the rest of my days pining for things that are about to pass into history. Honestly, can you imagine me following a herd of doddery aristocrats around the countryside while they shoot pheasants and bemoan the evils of Reform Bills? A fate worse than death!’

  ‘Well,’ says William, bowing in mock-obeisance, ‘if I can save you from such a fate, by showing you my humble factory …’

  ‘Nothing would amuse me more!’

  And they proceed through the gates.

  (What about Sugar, you ask? Oh well, yes, she enters too, hobbling on her crutch, with Sophie close by her side. How odd that Lady Bridgelow, for all her playful repudiation of patrician snobbery, appears not even to have noticed the governess’s existence — or perhaps her innate grace and tact don’t permit her to remark on the misfortune of a person’s physical disability. Yes, that must be the reason: she doesn’t wish to embarrass the hapless governess by enquiring how she came by her unsightly limp.)

  Sugar watches in dismay as William and Lady Bridgelow walk side by side, cutting a path through the toadies and sycophants who cringe to give them room. By contrast, those same employees edge inwards again after Mr Rackham and his distinguished guest have passed, as though primed to eject from the premises any interlopers who might be skulking in their wake. Sugar does her best to walk tall and hold her head high, putting as little weight as possible on her crutch, but she’s plagued by the additional pain of indigestion, and it’s all she can do not to grip her stomach and whimper.

  The factory itself, when the little party enters its fiercely lit interior, is nothing like Sugar had anticipated. She’d pictured a building of grand proportions, a cavernous, echoing structure like a railway station or a church, filled with monstrous machines that hum and gleam. She’d imagined the processes happening invisibly inside tubes and vessels, each feeding the other, while dwarfish human attendants oiled the moving parts. But Rackham’s Soap Factory isn’t that sort of set-up at all; it’s an intimate affair, conducted under ceilings as low as a tavern’s, with so much polished wood on show that it might almost be The Fireside.

  Stunted girls with pinched faces and red hands — a dozen of them, like manufactured replicas of Janey the scullery maid — are working in an atmosphere thick with the mingled odours of lavender, carnation, rose and almond. They wear rustic wooden clogs with roughened soles, for the stone floors are iced with a waxy, pellucid patina ofsoap.

  ‘Watch your step!’ says William, as he escorts his visitors into his fragrant domain. Under the glowing lights, his face is scarcely recognisable; his skin is golden, his lips silver, as he assumes the role of the master of ceremonies. Forgetting his reticence, free of his stutter, he points here, he points there, and explains everything.

  ‘Of course, what you see here is not strictly soap manufacture — that’s a dirty business, not worthy of a perfumer. The correct word for our far more fragrant procedures is re-melting.” He enunciates the word with exaggerated clarity, as if he expects his guests to scribble it on a notepad. Lady Bridgelow swivels her head in polite wonder; Sophie looks from her Papa to Lady Bridgelow and back to her Papa, puzzling over the mysterious chemistry that imbues the atmosphere between them.

  The bars of soap, which Sugar had imagined tumbling fully-formed out of a chute or a nozzle at the very end of a complex automaton, exist only as puddles of gelatinous ooze, twinkling in wooden moulds. Wire frames are poised above the aromatic goo, to guillotine it into rectangles when it stiffens. Each mould contains a different colour of mucus, with a different scent.

  ‘This yellow one is — or will be — Rackham’s Honeysuckle,’ says William. ‘It relieves itching, and the demand for it has grown five-fold this year.’ He dips a finger into the glimmering emulsion, and reveals two distinct layers. ‘This cream that’s risen, we skim off. It’s pure alkali, which in my father’s day was allowed to remain, thus making the soap irritating to sensitive skin.’

  He moves on to a different mould, whose contents are bluish and sweet-smelling.

  ‘And here we have what will become Rackham’s Puressence, a blend of sage, lavender and sandalwood oil. And here’ (moving on again) ‘is Rackham’s Jeunesse Eternelle. The green colour comes from cucumber, and the lemon and chamomile act as an astringent, restoring smoothness to the face.’

  Next he takes them to the curing chamber, where hundreds of bars of soap lie nestled on beds of metal and oak.

  ‘A full twenty-one days they’ll lie here, and not a day less!’ declares Rackham, as if malicious whisperers have claimed otherwise.

  In the wrapping room, twenty girls in lavender smocks sit at a massive table, ten on either side, overseen by a vulpine fellow who paces slowly around them, his ginger-haired hands hooked in his waistcoat pockets. The girls lean forward in formation, their brows almost touching as they enfold the soap in waxed paper parcels. Each of the parcels is printed with an engraving of William Rackham’s benevolent visage, as well as a minuscule text authored by Sugar one late night in May, while she and William sat side by side in bed.

  ‘Good morning, girls!’ says William, and they respond in chorus: ‘Good morning, Mr Rackham.’

  ‘Often they sing to themselves,’ says William to Lady Bridgelow and his other guests, with a wink. ‘But we’ve made them shy, you see.’

  He approaches the table, and gives the lavender lassies a smile. ‘Let’s hear a song, girls. This is my little daughter come to see you, and a very fine lady as well. You needn’t be bashful; we’re moving on to the crating hall now, and shan’t be watching you, but if we could only hear your sweet voices, why, that would be capital.’ Then, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial tone, he murmurs, ‘Do your best for me,’ while rolling his eyes meaningfully in the direction of Sophie, to appeal to their collective maternal nature.

  William and his visitors then proceed to a large vestibule at the rear of the factory, where sinewy shirt-sleeved men are packing loose piles of finished soaps into flimsy wooden caskets. Sure enough, no sooner have Lady Bridgelow, Sugar and Sophie stepped across the threshold than a melodious chanting starts up in the room they’ve just left: first one timorous voice, then three, then a dozen.

  ‘Lavender’s blue, diddle diddle,

  Rosemary’s green, diddle diddle,

  When I am king, diddle diddle,

  you shall be queen …’

  ‘And here,’ says William, pointing at two massive doors beyond which, through a crack, they can glimpse the world outside, ‘is where the factory ends — and the rest of the story begins.’

  Sugar, who has been preoccupied with the triple challenge of keeping her limp as unobtrusive as possible, restraining her urge to groan as her stomach gripes wickedly, and suppressing the temptation to punch Lady Bridgelow’s simpering face, becomes aware of a discreet tugging at her skirts.

&nbs
p; ‘Yes, what is it, Sophie?’ she whispers, bending down clumsily to allow the child to whisper in her ear.

  ‘I need to do a piddle, Miss,’ says the child.

  Keep it in, can’t you? thinks Sugar, but then she realises that she, too, is bursting to go.

  ‘Pardon me, Mr Rackham,’ she says. ‘Is there, on the premises, a room with … washing facilities?’

  William blinks in disbelief: is this some sort of obtuse enquiry about soap production, a gauche attempt to reprise her performance in his lavender fields, or is she requesting a formal tour of the factory’s water-closets? Then, mercifully, he understands, and commandeers an employee to show Miss Sugar and Miss Sophie the way to the conveniences, while Lady Bridgelow affects a consuming interest in the list of far-flung destinations chalked upon the delivery slate.

  (‘I heard one say, diddle diddle since I came hither that you and I, diddle diddle, must lie together …’)

  Lady Bridgelow ignores the child’s indiscretion with the grace of one whose pedigree exempts her from such gross frailties. Instead, she picks up an individual soap and studies the curious text on its wrapper.

  The employees’ latrine has a much more modern and streamlined appearance, in Sophie and Sugar’s eyes, than the rest of the soapworks. A row of identical white glazed stoneware pedestals, each attached to a brilliant metal cistern bracketed under the ceiling, exhibit themselves like a phalanx of futuristic mechanisms, all proudly engraved with the name of their maker. The seats are a rich brown, glossy with lacquer, brand new it seems; but then, according to the address inscribed on all the cisterns, the Doulton factory is only a few hundred yards down the road.

  The pedestals are so tall that Sophie, having clambered onto one, dangles her feet in space, several inches from the eggshell-blue ceramic floor. Sugar turns her back and walks a few steps farther along, studying the wall-tiles while Sophie’s pee trickles into the bowl. The pain in her guts is so sharp now that it catches her breath and makes her shiver; she longs to relieve herself, but the prospect of doing it in front of the child worries her, and she wonders if, by superhuman force of will, she can wait until later.